If you don’t have children the longing for them will kill you, and if you do, the worrying over them will kill you.

The line frames motherhood as a double bind: social and personal pressures make childlessness feel like a consuming absence, while having children brings a different, relentless burden of anxiety and responsibility. Read in light of Emecheta’s recurring themes—women’s constrained choices, the costs of caregiving, and the way patriarchal expectations turn reproduction into both duty and trap—the quote is less a literal claim than a bitterly comic truth about how women’s lives are structured around children either way. It captures the no-win calculus of desire versus duty, and the emotional labor that persists regardless of one’s reproductive status.